Contact/Email Problems

I’ve just discovered that a lot of the legitimate email sent via my contact page is being incorrectly labelled as spam by my email provider. This means that I haven’t received some of the emails that people have sent.

I’ve now looked though my spam folder and replied to those people whose emails were trapped in spam limbo. Some older emails though may be gone for good, so if you’ve contacted me over the past few months and not received a reply – please contact me again.

Steps have now been taken to fix this problem. Sorry about that.

Tell Me Your Problems

At some point in the near future I’m going to update my various Lucasarts game launchers to try and address issues with newer operating systems. To do this though, I need more information about the problems that people are experiencing.

Please contact me if you are having or have experienced problems with Monkey Island 3 (CMI), Monkey Island 4 (EMI) or Grim Fandango. I’m particularly interested in hearing from people using Windows Vista, Windows XP 64 and Windows Vista 64.

I want to know

  • Does the game’s installer work correctly? (There have been some reports that they don’t work on 64 bit versions of Windows)
  • Does the game load and run correctly?
  • Do my launchers work correctly? (CMI Launcher, EMI Launcher and Grim Fandango Launcher).
  • If you have a dual-core CPU, has this caused problems? Did these go away when you disabled dual core for the installer/game?

Please try and give me as much information about the problems and about your pc as possible. Make especially sure to mention what version of Windows you have.

What are you waiting for? Tell me your problems now.

Sam and Max and Bone Debug Menus

Heads up tinkerers, hackers and the 3 regular visitors to this site; I’ve just found out how to bring up the debug menu in recent Telltale games and now I’m going to show you how to do it too.

The debug menu lets you skip to any section of a game, complete with the appropriate inventory items. It’s therefore useful if you’ve lost your saved game or want to replay a specific section to see what you’ve missed. By ‘recent games’ I mean Bone 1+2 and all episodes of Sam and Max Season One. You’ll need to have bought and registered the games as the debug menu only works on registered versions. Activating the menu is a simple process.

In the Sam and Max games:

  • Hold Control, Shift and D on the keyboard and double click on the arrow button (the button that opens the menu).

In the Bone games:

  • Bring up the menu screen (by pressing escape) hold Control, Shift and D on the keyboard and click on the ‘quit’ option.

Cow Race Debug MenuOut From Boneville Debug MenuReality 2.0 Debug Menu

I found out how to activate the menu a long time ago; that is to say I worked out what had to be done to activate it, but I didn’t know the required key combination. Earlier today I was playing through the final episode of Sam and Max when I remembered the debug menu. In the past I’d tried a number of different key combinations..surely I’d tried the most obvious one? Without any expectations I pressed shift and D, double clicked and…nothing. I tried it with control and…aha. There’s no substitute for a lucky guess.

Email Back

My email is finally working again, so you can now get in touch with me via the contact page.

Psychonauts Explorer 1.3

After a long hiatus I’ve updated Psychonauts Explorer. Besides a range of tweaks and fixes the main feature of this release is better image/texture support. Images can now be saved as DDS files, saving is quicker and those images that previously had ‘jaggies’ are now drawn correctly.

New in version 1.3:

    Added:

  • As requested, images can now be saved as DDS files
  • Added ‘Save all text’ function

    • Changed:

  • Icons have been replaced with 32 bit icons. These will look much better on XP and Vista, but may look worse on earlier versions of Windows. This release has only been tested with XP
  • Saving individual images is now quicker
  • Image resizing/resampling has been updated. It should now give better results

    • Fixes:

  • Fixed a small memory leak
  • Fixed a glitch with file extensions when saving files
  • Fixed errors when opening an empty archive (cabhmusic.isb)
  • Fixed ‘jaggies’ problem that affected some images

Psychonauts Explorer

Download the new version here.

Telltale Tools – An Update

This is a quick post to clarify things regarding Telltale Explorer and my other Telltale-related tools. A few people have asked me when new versions of my programs will be released, supporting Sam and Max and the new directors cut versions of the Bone games.

The short answer is probably never, or at least not for the foreseeable future. Here’s why: All the newer Telltale games have encrypted datafiles, both the main .ttarch archive and the files within it are encrypted. The older Telltale games used this encryption only on lua scripts and images – which is why images in Out From Boneville appeared corrupted.

Recently John_Doe managed to figure out this encryption. This was a pretty amazing feat; the encryption was very complicated, especially in the newer games. Thanks to John_Doe I was able to update Telltale Explorer to add support for all Telltale Games and to fix many existing problems such as the image corruption in Out From Boneville.

However Telltale have requested that I don’t release the new version. This is a perfectly legitimate request, they were very nice about it and I will respect their wishes. Having a program floating around that decrypts all Telltale datafiles could cause them problems and I have no wish to encumber Telltale. The point I want to stress here is that Telltale didn’t do a Lucasarts on me. I wasn’t put under any pressure and I wasn’t sent a cease and desist notice; they made a request and I was happy to agree to it.

To clarify then: its highly unlikely that Telltale Explorer, Telltale Ttarch Creator and Telltale LangDB Editor will be updated. I probably will update the Telltale Music Extractor though.

New – USB Disk Ejector

USB Disk Ejector – a program that allows you to quickly remove USB devices in Windows XP. It’s essentially a replacement for the ‘safely remove hardware’ feature, but is quicker and simpler than drilling down through the safely remove hardware dialog. That`s the idea anyway.

I originally made this for my own use, so your mileage may vary.

USB Disk Ejector

Get it here.

Site mostly back

I’ve now fixed most of the problems caused by the server crash. Unfortunately my email is still down, so for now please contact me in the comments.

Telltale Updates Older Games

As you may know by now, Telltale have updated their older games. Out from Boneville and The Great Cow Race have been updated to the newest version of the Telltale engine. It looks like Texas Holdem will soon be updated too.

Unfortunately, they’ve also updated the resource files used by the games – these are all now encrypted. The end result of this is that Telltale Explorer cant handle the new resource files. CSI will still work, as will the old versions of the games, but the new updated ones wont. I’m trying to fix this, but its very difficult, since the new resource files are heavily obscured and encrypted. In the meantime, people can keep an eye on the SCUMM hacking forums to see what progress is being made.

Happily, there’s also good news. Music can still be extracted using the Telltale Music Extractor, and the tool also works with the new Telltale game – Sam and Max: Culture Shock (which you should all be buying).

Downtime

The Mixnmojo/Lfnetwork server had its annual hard drive crash last week – consequentally this site was also down. Things are mostly back to normal now, but there are still a few problems. For one thing, I’ve just noticed that the readme’s for the programs have all gone, I’ll try and fix this as soon as possible. In the meantime, if anyone notices any other problems please let me know.

[Edit] Let me know in the comments since email is also down.

Ttarch Creator Updated

I’ve updated the Ttarch Creator. It can now create .ttarch archives for Telltale Texas Hold’em, Bone: Out from Boneville and CSI – 3 Dimensions of Murder.

As a result, its name has changed from the Bone Ttarch Creator to the Telltale Ttarch Creator.

Get it here.

Telltale Explorer – Another New Tool

Telltale Explorer – a program to extract, view and convert resources from the 4 Telltale games that have been released so far. The tool will be instantly familiar to anyone that’s used Psychonauts Explorer, it uses the same interface and has similar features.

Some of the things that you can do with the latest version of Telltale Explorer:

  • Open and dump files from Telltale archives.
  • Display a preview of images, textures and fonts.
  • Save images/fonts as JPEG, BMP or PNG.
  • Extract and save music as ogg files.
  • Decode the dialog scripts for CSI and Texas Hold’em.
  • View the contents of many other Telltale files.

Get it here.

New Tool – Telltale Music Extractor

Some of you may remember the Bone Music Extractor tool. I’ve now replaced this with the Telltale Music Extractor.

It enables you to rip the music from all 4 Telltale Games (Telltale Texas Hold’em, Bone: Out From Boneville, CSI-3 Dimensions of Murder, Bone: The Great Cow Race).

Download it here.

Keep checking the site, I’ll be releasing another Telltale-related tool later in the week.

Site Revamp

After being plagued by comment spam the site’s news system has been changed from Cutenews to WordPress. This wont affect the site much, old url’s are automatically redirected, the only thing that people need to change is the url of the RSS feed.

Alongside this, the site’s design has been changed to give it a cleaner, more modern appearance. There shouldn’t be any problems with the new site, but if you notice anything please let me know.